The Literary Review has been a force for good in British public life, and I must sentimentally say that it was the first place I ever had anything published. But in 1993 its editor, Auberon Waugh, created a monster, soon to raise its ugly head again – the bad sex award, a prize for the most embarrassing description of sex in a new novel.

Bad sex award 2015: the contenders in quotes

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The writers who are baited in this way are of course supposed to grin and bear it, because to object in any way would be gleefully seized upon as evidence of humourless priggishness. It is like a nightmare ritual from the prefects’ room at some seedy minor public school.

When he won the prize, AA Gill, to his great credit, crisply compared Waugh’s own sex life to “the sound of one hand clapping”. I now have a suggestion. Those awarding the prize should be compelled to cite literary passages that they think are good sex: ie, explicit descriptions of sex that are not embarrassing.

And they’re not allowed to get away with airily claiming that subtle literary passages are much sexier – hey, Jane Austen is actually really erotic, etc, etc. No. The bad sex judges should say what explicit sex is good, and thereby risk revealing something about their own private lives.

Very cheap thrills

Talking of literary sex, the subject was raised among the mourners at the recent sad and beautiful funeral of the Observer’s legendary film critic Philip French, in a way that would have entertained Philip himself.

One of the congregants, Karl Marx’s biographer Francis Wheen, told me that a notorious erotic novel – a work by the New Statesman’s former film critic John Coleman – had recently been reissued as a Kindle download. While pursuing a bohemian and dissolute existence in Paris, Coleman wrote erotica for Maurice Girodias’s Olympia Press, in a series that included works by the Marquis de Sade and Jean Genet. His book was called The Enormous Bed, published under the pseudonym Henry Jones, the story of an amorous young man’s postwar adventures. It’s now available again for £1.49.

Adele’s river roots

There’s a new reason for getting excited about Adele’s new album 25. It has loads of vivid psycho-geography. One of the most striking tracks is River Lea, in which Adele finds the mystic source of her inspiration not just in the north London district of Tottenham, where she was born, but in the nearby River Lea itself, which flows from the Chiltern Hills through east and north London before joining the Thames.

Adele: 25 review – 'We've been here before,' she sings. And she's right

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I’ve always found it wonderful: when our son was very little, we used to take him for bike rides by the Lea: it has an eerie rus in urbe feel. Here’s what Adele sings: “When I was a child I grew up by the River Lea / There was something in the water, now that something’s in me … But it’s in my roots, it’s in my veins / It’s in my blood.”

Iain Sinclair is going to love Adele’s song. He is passionate about the Lea. Here’s how he wrote about it in 2002: “The earlier spelling … was Ley, which is even better. Lea as ley, it always had that feel. A route out. A river track that walked the walker, a wet road. The Lea fed our Hackney dreaming: a water margin.” I think Adele should invite Sinclair up on stage to sing a special River Lea duet.